Admired and abhorred as founding father of deconstruction

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Jacques Derrida, the influential French thinker and writer who
inspired admiration, vilification and bewilderment as the founder
of the intellectual movement known as deconstruction, has died. He
was 74.

He died in a Paris hospital on Friday of complications from
pancreatic cancer.

"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest
contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual
life of our time," France's President Jacques Chirac said.

Derrida's theory of deconstruction asserted that all writing was
full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent
could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself,
robbing text of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The
concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and
social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political
science, even architecture.

While he had a huge following, he was the target of as much
anger as admiration. For many he was the personification of a
French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the
traditional standards of classical education, and one they often
associated with divisive political causes.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases
to find hidden meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights and
Third World causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal
the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle,
Shakespeare, Freud and other "dead white male" icons of Western
culture.

The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of his movies
Deconstructing Harry, to suggest that his protagonist could
best be understood by breaking down and analysing his neurotic
contradictions. Towards the end of the 20th century deconstruction
became a code word of intellectual discourse, much as
existentialism and structuralism - two other fashionable, slippery
philosophies that also emerged from France after World War II - had
been before it. Derrida and his followers were unwilling - some say
unable - to define deconstruction with any precision, so it has
remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory
ways.